How to Focus On Songwriting – Tip 4
Tip 4 – Write out one full sheet of lyrics with the song’s melodies in your head without stoping, critiquing or editing it.
- Listen to the recorded ideas of your song, or play it on your instrument and get it inside your head.
- Sing the song in your head and pull out a sheet of paper and start writing the first words that come to your mind.
- Don’t critique or judge your lyrics as your writing them and finish the whole page with lyrics.
This is a way to start getting some ideas out. This is stream of conscious writing and is similar to the techniques I use previously for writing music ideas. I often use this technique because I have a lot of negative thoughts or critics in my head that stop my from producing. This helps override these thoughts and the more practice, the easier it is to let ideas flow.
There are so many ways to write lyrics, this is just one idea to get juices going. Here are some other methods I use:
I quickly write lyric ideas, words or phrases on my phone when they come to me. I use a note app on my phone that opens very fast so I don’t get impatient waiting. Later, when I listing to my recordings of music ideas, I can look back at this list and see if any of the lyrics fit the song.
Sometimes the words I sing in my recorded song ideas make no sense at all. I usually just sing whatever comes to me to get the melodies out. Most of the time it sounds like gibberish. If I don’t have a concept for a song, these gibberish words might give me some ideas.
I have noticed that I tend to use word that are easy to sing with the melody because of the meter and pitch. For example, I tend to use the word “night” a lot when I try to scramble melodies together because its easy for me to sing.
Some words just fit the melody or song well. No matter how much I try to change them, if no other word works as well as the one I started with, I will keep that word and try to start writing stories around it. I will usually use a mix of words that I started with in the recording and words from my list and new ones.
I hope I could give you some methods to start writing some lyrics fast. Please comment if you have any more ideas or methods.